Decline of social features, do DICE devs even play battlefield with friends?
The social UX (user experience) of BF games have always been buggy, inadequate and outright missing in bf2042.
Party system:
Buggy at the release of every bf I've played since BC2. Even now after 9 months of 2042, it is still BUGGY. My party would get split onto different teams at random. When two friends are on the same team in the same game, if one friend tries to join the other's party, he would get kicked out of the game and back in queue. If you are already in a party but not in the game session, you have to leave the party and then rejoin the party to join the game session.
Limited to squad size. The most painful point is when 5 friends are on and the 5th friend would usually play by himself or just log off for the night. Why should this be a problem when matches are 128 and 64 players? Should be a simple feature to increase party size to say 8, and split the party into two squads once in game. Other games already have this feature (Halo).
Joining on a friend:
Also buggy in every release. In BFV, I can't remember how many times I've had to tell my friends the server code of the game I was in, they would then manually type it in to search for it and then join. What year are we in? Yes there was suppose to be a join on friend feature with origin, but that was broken most of the time. In BF2042, I would say it is 50/50 whether the join button actually does anything or gave any feedback.
Squad management:
This was a working feature in previous battlefields but completely obtuse in bf2042. We can't make squads, we can't lock squads to party/friend, we can't join a specific squad. However, there is the option to change to a completely random new squad. How is joining a random squad a useful feature?
VOIP:
Deemed legacy feature and was not added in until half a year later. Even when they did add it, it probably wasn't working for most people who turned it on because the game UI didn't show the mic input until the latest 1.1 patch.
I've made many friends and hundreds of acquaintances in the BF series. In most cases, that started with communicating with in game VOIP with a random squaddie who played the objective. After a few matches, coordinating tactics, and chit-chatting, I would usually add them as a friend in Origin. Back then people you worked well with would get invited to your TeamSpeak/Ventrilo server, and with a big enough friend group clans would form. Even now with Discord being the primary VOIP tool, it still takes talking to a random IN GAME, to know that they have a mic, they are competent, and chill before they would be invited to discord.
For bf2042, I've made zero friends in-game, compared to 200+ friends added during BF4.
Community Servers:
Another key aspect to BF has always been the community servers. With persistent servers ran by competent mods, BF thrived socially. You got to know a familiar group of players and that gave chance for friendships and clans to form. Which also leads to clan rivalries going. Community servers also had the benefit of mods who can respond to obvious hackers. The same hackers who destroyed BFV servers regularly without consequence.
Clan Support:
I don't think DICE devs realize how important clans are to the sustained player count of multiplayer games. Every popular mobile game have clan features in their games, because it delivers player retention. On the cynical side, a player who may not be motivated to play the base game can be incentivized to play just to be social with clan members.
Most people are social and want to be a part of a group achieving a common goal. I believe a successful clan implementation should be more than just having a tag next your name. The clan feature should have tangible goals and rewards for the whole clan to achieve.
I asked do DICE devs even play battlefield with friends because from my perspective they do not, and vital social features are often neglected and cut completely. Any developer who play BF with friends should know the myriad issues that exist within past and current BF titles that should be a priority to fix. For such a team oriented game, I hope DICE can facilitate that by paying more attention to the social features of the game.
